Hey everyone, I live in a fairly modern condo unit built in 2007. The building has 18 units.

Inside my unit there were phone jacks in the walls. I wanted ethernet in the rooms as well. In fact, I'd rather have ethernet and no phone.

When I looked at the phone jacks (took the face plate off the jack) I noticed that the wires in the wall look just like Cat5 (Standard ethernet wire).

What I don't understand: How can I find where all of these wires end up? I need to get to a point where I can attach a router and I'm just not sure where that would be. Any advice would be very appreciated. Thanks!

You should have a demarcation box somewhere in your abode. That box is the point where you fone provider usually ends his responsibility. It may be the origin of all the cat wire.
Or your complex may have a ["MDF"], main distribution frame somewhere.
Two possibilities, hard to tell from here, certainly good luck though..

This message has been edited. Last edited by: CommonwealthSparky,

your phone wiring is probably cat 2, and in 25-pair bundles that go to a series of punch blocks in a utility room. they are the building's property, and are dedicated to telephone service.

you are not going to be using those for data. first, the property company is going to charge you like no tomorrow. trust me on this, I was the center head tech in a "out of region" DSL project at a major telco that lost obscene amounts of money on that. second, they are too creepy for data.

you can certainly have DSL run on this internal wiring, and put your router at any of the jacks. if you want very premium service (for us, it's presently 40 meg down and 5 meg up,) the router is going to have to be put in the utility room and a separate cat-5 run to your unit. again, ugly. best you can probably get is 12/1 speeds on that IW.

room to room, consider using wireless with a good secure password on all devices. alternately, I ran cat-5 in my apartment days around the baseboards and under radiators using Eagle baseboard clips, metal (now a division of Cooper, and probably discontinued.)

again, strongly consider wireless 11G.

Thanks for the replies guys! I've found where all of the wires end up.

There was another access panel inside of one of my closets where all of the wires end up (it's also where all of my cable wires were routed to).

Looks like that's where my router will need to go after I crimp rj-45 jacks on all of the wires.

Here's a link to a reddit DIY post my friend made for this same problem (he's the one who owns the condo)

http://www.reddit.com/r/DIY/co...t5_cables_for_phone/

There's further description here and also pictures.

Thanks for all of the advice though!

Always great to hear...

lucky find, the builder was ahead of the curve! enjoy the data flow

Wish I had been quicker. I would have recommended you consider this Module from On-Q. It plugs right into the http://allabouthomeelectronics...ructured-wiring.html Structured Wiring box and turns those Cat5 wires into both Ethernet and Phone lines. I've put several of them in including in my own home and it works literally perfect.

oh, look, spammy spam! and bad spam, too. data wiring does not daisy-chain or parallel like a traditional POTS phone system, it has to interconnect port to port with a switch or hub. this thing would hang your network.

in fact, on some older DSLAMs by some vendors, this would crash the telco's DSLAMs and you would be disconnected for the protection of the public network.

you need a switch for data. the only thing this interconnect block would be good for is punching down the A side of each cat-5 data run, then using patch cables between the jacks and a switch's ports. those DIP switches in the blue there? -- they would all have to be switched OFF. flip one on, the network is hung with broadcast storms.